Over a year ago we announced our intention to build scrapers that would collect and sanitize legislative information from all fifty states, an initiative that is now known as the Open State Project.
As of today we're proud to announce a new milestone for the project, version 1 of the Open State Project API. You can start using our API today to get access to information on more than 37,000 bills and 1,600 legislators from the most recent sessions of 10 state legislatures.
Continue readingHow We Use MongoDB at Sunlight
Last week, David and I attended MongoNYC, a one-day conference focused on MongoDB. We like Mongo here at Sunlight. We like it a lot.
Working with Mongo, it's become clear that it's a more natural way to store data. We primarily use Python and Ruby, and because Mongo allows us to think in JSON, everything tends to just click. JSON documents are close enough to objects in Python and Ruby that mapping between application and database becomes almost effortless. Mongo has really shined in two specific use cases: as a datastore for a resource oriented web service, and as a datastore for results from scraping a web site.
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